Trump's legal nemesis makes major prediction about president's pet Supreme Court case

President Donald Trump's executive order eliminating birthright citizenship is going to go down in flames at the Supreme Court, former ethics czar and impeachment attorney Norm Eisen confidently predicted on MS NOW's "Morning Joe" Wednesday.

"So, Norm, your organization, Democracy Defenders, co-counsel to the ACLU in this case, challenging Donald Trump's use of the executive order here, defending the 14th Amendment," said anchor Willie Geist. "This is not the first time that a case like this around birthright citizenship has been argued before the Supreme Court. What is the case you all will be making today?"

"We will make the case that since the founding of the United States, it's been understood that the children of migrants born here are citizens," said Eisen. "That's an ancient tradition in Anglo-American law. It was reaffirmed in the 14th Amendment. There's no real serious question about that. And that was confirmed, really, in 1898 in the Wong Kim Ark case."

"So this has been good Supreme Court law for over a century," Eisen continued. "Congress has passed a statute reaffirming this. And until the farcical intellectual gyrations of Donald Trump, where he doesn't follow the law, he thinks the law should follow him, nobody seriously questioned that the children of migrants born in this country were citizens of the country."

The bottom line, he added, is that "Donald Trump doesn't get to choose which babies born here are citizens. The Constitution and the 14th Amendment make that choice."

Trump is planning to attend the Supreme Court arguments himself, Eisen noted — the first time in U.S. history a sitting president has done this.

"I'll be in court with the legal team today, and I'm looking forward to Donald Trump hearing directly from a majority of the justices on the Supreme Court bench that these arguments he's making, like so many of his other attacks on the rule of law, fly in the face of the Constitution and our laws," said Eisen.

- YouTube youtu.be